Film: Jai Mummy Di

Director: Navjot Gulati

Cast: Sunny Singh, Sonnalli Seygall, Supriya Pathak, Poonam Dhillon

Jai Mummy Di opens with a slowly established sequence that is way too stupid and literal, to be true. It’s almost like the makers made the film entirely for that one song that opens the film, “Meri Mummy Nu Pasand Nahi Tu”, to explain the meaning of the film literally.

Apart from poor acting in the first half of the film, there is also something amiss in the overall narrative of the Sunny Singh and Sonnalli Seygall starrer. There are constant speed–breakers in the pace of the film that are only redeemed once in a while by the music.

The background score helps in various places of this deliberate situational comedy. Tracks like “Manney Ignore Kar Rahi” lift up the repetitive slowness of the film but fail to wrap up the regressive mentality behind making such films in the first place.

After De De Pyaar De, Ranjanites are back with another tale that has two women in the family feud because of love for one man, the old-school classic Bollywood favourite idea for rom-com. And, filmmaker Navjot Gulati does not settle at just that; he goes on to again show, like so many other Bollywood rom-com, that the only concern of a woman’s life after her education is to rightly get married.

The liberal, educated character of Saanjh played by Sonnalli Seygall only wants to get married to her high-school sweetheart played by Sunny Singh. Another, Ranjan family actor, Sunny’s character, is a puppy-faced man who does not have the spine to stand up to what he believes and manages to victimize himself in all situations.

All men fear women in the film, a trope that is carried forward in a way that is way beyond believable, if the makers intended to ground their story in the locales of Delhi. They did succeed in the design part of the film, dialogues, and the colloquial Delhi slang, but the otherwise dictatorial mothers who rule their sons (very real), but everyone else was almost caricaturist.

Supriya Pathak and Poonam Dhillon could not lend much to their very poorly written characters.

The second half of Jai Mummy Di is much better than the first in terms of its pace and drama. The story grows on you if one is patient, but otherwise, flat acting by all major characters with mindless personifications of men in the Bhalla and Khanna family, makes it a bland entertainer.

The effort to make the film a comedy shows and the desperate manipulation of situations to make them look improvised and comic does not materialize to give any results.

A forceful comedy of sorts, Jai Mummy Di is a one-time watch with roughly sketched screenplay and poor acting. Perhaps, the text did not give the actors much space to bring something of them in the disjointed drama that does not do away from the fact that the problem lies at both ends; the writing and the actors.

Though the film does have some genuinely funny moments, some romantic moments that hit the right note and ease-of-manner chemistry between the two leads redeem many problematic parts of the text.

Punjabi remixes dominate the music album and stereotypes propagate the Ranjanite model of modern-day romances and liberal womanhood. Other than that, there is nothing to vouch for in the film.

Rating: 1